Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover (8 page)

Apparently we were tabling our discussion. More resistance than they’d expected, perhaps.

They were alive and not even limping much, which was something, considering their car looked like it had gone through a junkyard crusher. Still staring my way, they backed up to the other vehicle. Five seconds later it peeled onto the road and took off.

Dave hopped out and I met him halfway, stepping over the remnants of the welding tank. Diesel pooled and gasoline fumes drifted across the war zone.

“Thought you’d gone,” I said.

“Come on.” He had keys in his hand. “Car’s up the road. We got to get out of here.”

“Just a minute.” The landslide of bricks had so deformed the Nissan’s rear bumper that the license plate had sprung off. I picked it up.

I could run it later, maybe find out who we were dealing with.

“Let’s go.” Dave was impatient. “We got to
move
.”

True enough. Traffic was awfully light, but civilians were sure to happen by any minute. My own car was trapped by the fallen truck. I nodded and we started to jog up the road.

“Why’d you come back?” I said as I holstered the Sig—a little awkward, while we ran.

Dave grinned over his shoulder. “Why?
Why
?” he said. “You’re my
brother,
man.”

M
aybe I should drive,” I said, clutching the roll bar at the side pillar so hard my hand hurt.

“Don’t be stupid.” Dave slowed, took the Charger through the blinking-light intersection at about sixty, double-clutched down and accelerated back up to eighty. “You don’t know this car like I do.”

“No.” We passed a motorcycle, then feathered back into the lane just in front of an oncoming pickup. “But I know other things. For example, I know I’d like to live at least until—
look out
!”

Coming around an endless curve, trees down to the verge blocking all views, we were suddenly up the tail of a big brown UPS truck. Instead of steering left to pass, Dave yanked the wheel just enough right to throw the car into a skid—and we drifted into the passing lane anyway, tires screaming, all the way around and past the truck. At the last moment, before we exited the blacktop entirely, Dave touched the gas. The wheels bit again, and we were back in control, a hundred yards ahead of the stunned UPS man.

“You ain’t one to talk,” Dave said. “After getting my garage all shot to hell.”

There was that. “Would you just keep your eyes on the damn road?”

As we approached Clabbton, traffic increased, vehicles every few hundred yards in both directions. Small houses sat back from the street, with wide scraggly yards. We shot past a roadhouse, dark windows under a low roof, a faux neon sign in the shape of a naked woman, three Harleys parked out front.

“Maybe we should figure out where we’re going,” I said.

Dave glanced sideways. “How much ammo you got left in that gun?”

“Dunno.” Three rounds loaded and a spare magazine, but the very question made me not want to answer. “Why?”

“Didn’t you recognize that car?”

“What?”

“The Saturn. Long scratch on the left panel, crack in the windshield? Brendt, hell, he’s been driving that thing for years. I helped him overhaul the brakes a couple years ago.”

“
Brendt?
Your improvised-explosives buddy?”

Maybe the car had looked a little familiar.

“He was driving it yesterday, up at the mill. I can’t believe you didn’t see it right off. Hell, for a moment I was afraid Brendt was gonna be inside it.”

I tried to keep up. If Brendt was involved, the story changed completely. Much better this was some local hillbilly feud or something, rather than people looking for me.

Much, much better.

Though I couldn’t see how the Nissan could chase me two days ago and not be connected. “You think this was, I don’t know, a
prank
?”

“No, course not.” He sounded offended. “I can’t say about your friends, but mine? They don’t generally try to blow the shit outta me.”

“So what—?”

“So maybe he let somebody use his car. Loaned it out.” Dave shook his head, not looking away from the road. “Brendt, well, he’s a few feathers short of a duck, you know? If someone came up and told him a story, he’d go right ahead and believe it.”

He accelerated again, the engine loud and road noise louder. We closed at frightening speed on more Sunday drivers ahead.

I decided I’d had enough.

“Pull over,” I yelled above the Charger’s roar.

“What?”

“Stop the car, damn it!”

Dave slowed abruptly, but only to avoid colliding with the pickup in front of us. The road rose into a long hill. Trees and dirt on one side, a long low school on the other. The parking lot was vast and empty.

“In there.” I whacked Dave’s shoulder and pointed. “We need to stop.”

He started to say something, then jerked the wheel in an irritated way, engaged the hand brake briefly and took us through the lot’s entrance in a long, graceful skid. He kept it going across half the acre of pavement, the car feeling completely out of control, rubber screaming. We finally slid to a stop dead in the middle, turned all the way around. After a moment Dave killed the engine.

Silence.

I breathed a few times.

“What’s wrong?” Dave shifted in his seat, flexing his muscles, twisting restlessly.

Combat adrenaline stops being your friend as soon as any immediate danger’s over. The worst mistakes in the field happen at the end of an engagement, when everyone’s still totally jacked and can’t stop shooting.

“At the moment, no one’s trying to kill us,” I said. “We need to take a break, calm down and think it through. No need to rush off. Last thing we want to do is stumble right into another assault.”

“They fucking obliterated my shop!”

“Yes, they did.”

“And almost killed me!”

“Me too, for that matter.”

“Shit!”

It took a few minutes, but he finally settled. As we sat quietly, I studied our surroundings. The school was single story, brick and aluminum, the way they built them in the sixties. Illegible graffiti wound around the walls in the back, poorly scrubbed off. An old Dodge Sportsman was parked at the rear corner, a stylized wolf’s head painted on its side—the team van, no doubt.

On the other side of an open field was another, smaller school, playground structures on woodchips alongside. The acres of empty parking felt like the old P1 lot at Shea on an off day.

“You okay now?” I said after a while.

“Sure.” His breathing was normal.

Sunshine and faint birdsong. Life in the country.

“We’re alive, we’re in one piece, let’s keep it that way.” The veteran soldier’s philosophy.

Dave looked around. “I went to school here,” he said.

I blinked. “High school?”

“All the way through.” He gestured at the elementary building. “Kindergarten on up.”

“Like it?”

He shrugged. “My foster dad taught me to drive right here. Round and round the parking lot.”

“Seems like a good place—nothing to run into.”

“Nope, just stalled out like a hundred times.”

“And look at you now.”

Cars passed on the road. A few hundred yards down two orange trucks were parked at the side, along with an excavator—all locked up and empty, in the middle of some infrastructure project that would no doubt resume on Monday.

“I think we can rule you out as the target,” I said.

“Huh?”

“I’m the one they were shooting at. You just happened to be there.”

“Well, I . . . sure.” He seemed flummoxed. “No one’s got any reason to be gunning for
me
.”

Since the attack on the garage we’d been riding momentum, but the forward velocity had burned out. Energy drained away, leaving me slumped in the roll cage.

The interior of Dave’s car, I should mention, was barren. Not even a sound system. Just exposed metal—cleanly painted, to be sure, even around the welds and joints—two bucket seats in the front and a plain bench in the rear, and some serious safety equipment. Not only the bars, which bolstered the entire frame, but five-point harnesses and a fire extinguisher, clamped sideways under the dash.

Also, no speedometer. Just a big tachometer, and smaller dials I didn’t recognize.

“Is this what you expected?” I asked. “When you wrote that letter?”

“Naw.” Dave didn’t say anything else for a moment, then laughed. “I mean, not exactly. It ain’t like I had so much to lose, back there. I had the shop five years now. No—six? Six in November. But the mortgage is so far underwater, I wasn’t looking at
ever
paying off. Fuck it.”

Mortgage? For a convicted felon coming off real prison time? The timing put it right before the bubble burst, which was just believable. Banks were lending to
anybody,
right up until the whole thing exploded. Pulse and a scrawled X—good enough!

“You need to call the police,” I said. “Right now.”

“But Brendt’s car –”

“You’re not a detective.” I glanced over, then back out the windshield. “Neither am I. This isn’t a fistfight behind the pool hall—those guys were using military full auto. Like it or not, law enforcement is going to be all over Clabbton.”

“So what?”

“So you need to talk to them.”

“What about you?”

“Ah.” We’d come to the hard part of the conversation. “Well, I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Talk to them.” I turned toward him again, and didn’t take my gaze away this time. “I have a complicated life.”

Dave half frowned, half rolled his eyes. “I
knew
it.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“No? You’re gonna take off, leave me standing here scratching my ass?”

“Um.” That was about right, in fact.

“Like I said.”

“I need to do three things,” I said. “Number one is find out who’s trying to kill me, and why. No way I can do that from inside a jail cell.”

“Uh-huh. What’s number two?”

“Then I’ll . . . discourage them.”

“Kill them.” He said it without particular emphasis.

“No. Not unless I absolutely have to. That just attracts even more attention, which interferes with goal number three.”

“Yes?”

“When it’s over, I disappear.”

A siren in the distance, but it faded away. I rolled my window all the way down—with a crank, no power assists in the Charger—and leaned one arm out.

“We’ve barely got to know each other,” Dave said.

“I’ll stay in touch.”

“You’re kinda missing the point.”

I sighed. “Drop me off and call the cops, okay?”

“No.” He smiled. “I’m going with you. We’ll solve this together.”

“That’s a really bad idea.”

“Nope.”

A pause. Eventually I said, “Okay, tell me.”

“First, like I told you, I got some history with the law. If I talk to Gator, he’s gonna be thinking one thing—somehow, some way, it’s my fault. Or at least I’m involved.”

“Gator?”

“Police chief in Clabbton. He went to school here too, matter of fact. That history I mentioned—he’s in it.”

“Is that his real name?”

“Course it is.” Dave hesitated. “I mean, it’s what we always called him. I ain’t never seen a birth certificate.”

“Never mind.”

“But more important is
you
.” He reached over and kind of lightly slapped my head. “My brother.”

What could I say?

“All right.” I shook my head. “Okay. Let’s do this—we’ll try to chase down Brendt’s car.” Truth was, I needed Dave’s help anyway. He was the local, and I didn’t know
anything
. “But you’re not going underground. First opportunity, you have a sit-down with, uh, Gator. And if the bad guys show up with tanks and missiles again, you go straight to safety. I can take care of myself.”

“Sure, that’s fine. But meanwhile, if anyone asks . . . ?”

“Don’t mention the shop. You weren’t there, you don’t know anything about it.”

“Great!” His mood had swung back to cheerful, like some inconsequential spot of bother was now behind us.

I should work on being so resilient.

“So this little setback—?”

“I got the car.” Dave slapped the dash. “I got a few hundred bucks in my pocket. They’ll repossess everything else. So what?” He grinned. “I got
you
, Silas. It’s all good.”

“Uh . . .”

What we had, actually, was at least a dozen stone killers chasing us, a trail of destruction, and nowhere to run. That I could think of. “Yeah. All good.” Christ.

Dave started the car and we drove out of the lot—slowly, this time. Only ten or twenty miles over the speed limit. The town was quiet. Everything seemed normal again.

We stopped at a light, the crossroads empty. A stone church at the corner was boarded up, even the clerestory windows nailed over. As we waited, another siren rose, then a blue light, and a big, red, shiny, double-cab pickup flashed past, whip antenna streaming behind it.

I didn’t like that. “Unmarked police?”

“Naw, the volunteer firefighters. I think that was Dink—I heard he got a new truck. Someone must have seen the smoke and called it in.”

The welding shop was not only a fire hazard, it was also a crime scene. The local PD wouldn’t know what to do with it, so state detectives would jump in. Once they ran the ballistics and discovered that military-grade armament had been involved, they’d probably call the FBI. I groaned.

“You all right?”

“Great.” Looking Dave up was starting to seem like the worst decision I’d made since punching out a first lieutenant one night in a Kabul bar. “Really great.”

—

We stopped in front of a small, sagging bungalow. Dave parked directly on its gravel drive, blocking access onto the road. Clabbton didn’t seem to go in for zoning: next door was another house only slightly less ramshackle, then a car wash and a feed store. Down the road the other way an empty, weedy lot surrounded a charred foundation.

“Maybe you should stay here.” Dave studied the house. “Brendt, well, he don’t always take well to strangers.”

“I met him yesterday!”

“Not at his house. He gets kinda territorial.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Just saying.”

I looked hard at him. “Maybe I should come in.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t.”

The staredown went on a few seconds too long.

“Fine.” What was I going to do, shoot my own brother? “Keep it simple. Don’t use my name.”

“Course not.”

“Five minutes, then I’m coming in.”

“Why? I
told
you—”

“I need to hear the story myself.”

“Whatever.” He slammed the door on the way out.

Cars swooshed past. None slowed, but I felt every eye. The Charger was about as anonymous as a parade float. It even looked a little like one, covered in white smears of turtle wax.

Dave walked across the ill-kempt lawn, going opposite the drive, around the side of the house. Paper shades were pulled down two of the windows I could see, and the third was dark and crusted with dirt.

I checked my phone—still working. It might have cost twenty dollars but it seemed to be as reliable as any of that military-grade hardware the army loaded us down with. I called Zeke.

No answer.

Johnny—no answer.

Ryan—you get the picture.

I checked the Sig Sauer. It still smelled from the firefight. I didn’t feel like disassembling it—who knows what Brendt was up to? I might need a weapon again real soon. The cleaning would have to wait. Instead, I took my one spare magazine, removed all the rounds and pushed them back in again, nice and careful. The used magazine still had three left, so I put it in an outside pocket.